Ruby Thoughts
by MorriganFearn
Summary: Character introspection on familial dysfunction in the game. Why did Norman run away at the very end?


**Author's note** (from 2005): I finally finished my Ruby game today -- that's after, what, three years of playing it? Maybe I should be less obsessive about catching and raising every pokemon I meet. Anyway, I couldn't help noticing how dysfunctional the main character's family is. Especially at the end when Norman FINALLY comes home -- only to run out again. So, here is a series of three shorties dedicated to that messed up household. It has no plot beyond what the game gives us. This is just a character introspection piece.

**Disclaimer:** Nintendo owns the pokemon games. I am not Nintendo. Therefore, I do not own. Nyeh.

**Warnings:** This story could be taken as a parody or an angst fest. It all depends on what you bring to the table in the first place. Mild spoilers for the dialogue in the games abound. I hope no one minds. Finally, a warning to all gift giving fathers: Clocks are worse than socks.

* * *

**Mother**

* * *

Two years.

I haven't seen him for two years, except once on the TV. And now I've moved to this backwater just for a man I hardly know. I have a ten year old girl who just stares at me blankly when her father's name is mentioned.

"Look, isn't it nice?" I ask as she gets out of the truck. "The pokemon movers are already getting our stuff in."

"Yeah," May agrees. "I guess so. There is stuff to do around here, right?"

"Of course. I'm certain," I smile at her. "Why Professor Birch lives right next door. I think he has a son your age. But first let's check out your room. Nor - your father got you a present for your home coming."

I can tell May is excited, the way her eyes shine for a minute before suspicion clouds them was all the clue I need.

"It's not socks, is it?" she asks.

"It's a clock," I tell her.

"Oh."

"Well, go upstairs and set it," I tell her, trying to put the best face on the situation. We both walk into the house.

It smells clean, and I'll probably have a lot of time to keep it that way. May, after staring at the machoke cluttering our new living room hurries upstairs. I sit down at the kitchen table, directing the machoke where to place the china, where to put my cabinates.

They leave shortly, and I find myself staring blankly at the old TV, which is not up against the wall where I told them to put it. It's now become the center of the room. This is a strangely depressing thought.

I pick the remote out of a box and turn on the new centerpiece in the living room. It's him! His face is on the screen, almost whited out by the ancient color tubes, but he's still there. My husband. The famous normal gym leader, Norman.

He hasn't aged; not a wrinkle added, or hair missing. He still could be eighteen and under that sitrus tree, kissing a giggling, gasping girl and whispering his dreams in her ear. She believed in them whole heartedly back then.

She still does, I realize with a pang. She still believes in the burning ambition for fortune and glory - only now she understand the price. The pursuit of training must come before anyone and anything else.

All the passion he had for that girl under the tree, for the baby who was born nine months later, is still there, burning in his eyes, but now it's been redirected, hasn't it? It all goes towards his dreams.

I suppose he thinks that he can just come back, and everything will be the same. That the girl won't have grown tired of waiting for love, and that the daughter won't have grown up. That they'll both remember him.

I'll remember him. I've spent too many years remembering him to break the habit now. But May? One day he'll come home, and meet a stranger in his house, a stranger who stopped needing him to play rapidashy with her a long time ago. No, May won't need her father for anything. Even when he does become rich and famous, she'll still go her own way, not knowing or really caring about the man who abandoned her.

"May!" I call. "Come quickly, your father is on TV!"

* * *

**Daughter**

* * *

This is awkward I realize. For him at least. He's staring at me as if he's trying to understand that I'm his daughter.

I don't know why it's not awkward for me. Well, no more awkward than I suspect meeting any other gym leader will be. My palms are sweaty, and my heart must be beating so hard that it's fit to burst. I'm going to have my first gym battle, I've only been training for a month, but I'm ready. I have no pure fighting pokemon, but I'm certain that my combusken can make it against his normal types. She's only just evolved. But who cares? I'm going to win my first gym battle.

"I see," he finally says. "You wish to challenge me. Very commendable."

Very commendable?! We have a battle on the line here and he's complimenting me? Are all gym leaders this slow? And why won't he stop staring. It's as if he's judging me, measuring me up to some invisible line.

"However, I don't think that you are ready yet. Come back when you have four gym badges," he tells me.

"But!" I begin. He can't do this. I'm ready. I've been training. I'm prepared!

"No buts, young lady. Get out of here and challenge Roxanne. She's the leader of the Rustburo gym," he tells me.

I don't understand. I've heard he accepts challenges from everyone. Why not me? What have I not done to impress him enough? I look, and I see into his mind, almost as clearly as my newly caught ralts. He is testing me. He thinks I'll not be able to make it to four badges. He doesn't want to lose and he knows he'll go easy on me because I'm his daughter.

That shouldn't come into it! It shouldn't! It's unfair!

I turn and walk out the door. I was ready! I will be ready, next time, too. I'll show him!

* * *

**Father**

**

* * *

**There is silence in the house. When Birch called from Ever Grande City you would have thought that it was his daughter who had just become league champion. He brought her home on her troipus, and hustled her off to bed as quickly as he could. For all I know May went to sleep instantly. I didn't arrive until two hours later. After some old sailor hobbled into my gym with a ticket and told me it was for May, and wasn't I proud that my daughter was the champion?

"So," I look at my wife.

"Everyone says that she has your spirit, and your way with pokemon," she smiled tightly, her her thoughts most likely saying something completely different.

"Indeed."

I wish I knew why this was so hard. This is my house after all. This is my wife, a little aged around the eyes, but still a healthy and beautiful woman just the same. Upstairs my daughter is sleeping, her blaziken most likely standing guard, her manetric curled at the foot of her bed, her wailord in his pokeball, since there is no way that he could come out without an ocean near by, I know that her flygon is on the roof, and I would bet anything that her glalie is in a corner by her bed right where she can put her hand on his cold, craggy exterior should she wake from a nightmare and need to be reminded of the realness of the world.

So why is this so hard? Why does it feel as if everything has changed? Why doesn't this feel like my home? These people - they aren't my family. They don't feel nearly as close to me as slaking. I smile back at my wife, but feel the fragile muscle movement waver and tumble into an abyss.

I try to remember her as the sixteen year old co-ordinator that I first met. The first pokemon trainer I had ever encountered who did not care about battling. But that naÃ¯ve girl was so different from the woman who I fell in love with and married alsmost as soon as I could. I hadn't liked the young coordinator. I loved the good friend who came to cheer me on as I bested the gyms of Johto and Kanto.

And this older version was different from either. There was that melting look of empathy in her eye, of support, both were still there, and all for me. But bitterness had stolen into the picture. Loneliness. This woman would not gasp in uninhibited delight as I kissed her neck. She would gasp, but it would be a gasp of repressed pain, the turbid emotions of knowing that I might not be there tomorrow, so she had to enjoy what she could get now.

There is a creek on the stairs and I whirl around in my chair, glad for the interruption, until I glimpse the familiar stranger there, looking at me with brown eyes and messy hair.

"Hello," I manage. "I see that you've grown stronger."

You are stronger, I think silently. Stronger than I ever will be. You already have the training world at your feet, and it's only been a year and a half since you first picked up that torchic's pokeball. Everything I've worked for and fought for all these years - you have that in the palm of your hand.

Who are you? My rival? My hero?

You can't be my daughter. My daughter is a sweet little toddler who needs me to help her walk. She's not some child prodigy. She's not a great trainer. She's not Professor Birch's prized trainer. She is not the equal of Steven Stone. You can't be my daughter.

I babble, hand her the ticket, and then make the quickest exit I can. I can't face the strangeness, of that house, that girl. How can the daughter I had no hand in creating, out do me? Not even Birch helped all that much. She made herself. Just as I made myself. But she is not my daughter.

* * *

Thank you for reading. Would you kindly leave me a review?

~ MF


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